Virtually Home

So "Boomer Sooner" is about all I have to say. I'm tired of missing things.

This is a photo of the chicken I cooked tonight, posing with Charlie, the inflatable turkey my parents mailed me a week or so ago. For scale, that inflatable turkey is 16" long. So, in the absence of a (real) turkey (and really the absence of ambition to make a turkey), I decided to roast a chicken, which I'd never done before. By the time I got my plans for roasting a chicken together, it was already 6 p.m. and I was beginning to get hungry, so I decided to just put some olive oil and rosemary and garlic under its skin and go with that. For some reason, it always looked really easy to do this kind of thing when I was watching my mother do it. What I didn't take into account is that chickens have skin that doesn't float freely over their muscles. I'm not really sure how I even thought that was possible -- maybe I just always missed the part where my mother must have spent several awkward minutes pulling the skin loose and listening to the fascia tear. I'm ...

In a country without Thanksgiving, there's not even a pretense of delaying Christmas until its allotted time. Decorations have been going up for weeks now -- lights hung from the sides of buildings and wires strung overhead were the first go show up. Yesterday they started putting up huge trees in Place de la Victoire and by the cathedral near my house. Also coming to Place Pey-Berland is what appears to be an ice-skating rink? I'm interested to see how this is going to pan out. I was told that it will rain all winter, which I interpreted to mean it will never get cold enough to freeze. I guess I didn't expect ice-skating. Although I've never been fond of even the idea of ice-skating -- all that strapping blades to your feet and gliding about and falling on your face seems to lend itself pretty handily to getting digits cut off. But since Thanksgiving is finally upon us, I'll stop feeling weird about seeing Christmas decorations. I'll even be posting pictures...

Today I had my first exam in France. It was a really straightforward test over the International Phonetic Alphabet, in a class that is composed of nothing but linguistics majors. So imagine my surprise when I noticed rampant cheating. Not that it would have been difficult, as we had one exam form, and one proctor for a class of over 200, who didn't even walk around the room during the test, didn't discourage people from talking, or even look up when cell phones rang and were answered. Also the girl in front of me kept asking me for answers. I pretended I didn't understand her. And that's today's advantage to being foreign! But seriously. If you're a linguist, shouldn't you know IPA?

This is going to be a long and rambling post. Most of it is going to be specific information about the two concerts I saw this week. Don't say I didn't warn you. Last weekend was a rather nocturnal one for me. Sunday night found me trying desperately to sleep "early" and utterly failing until 7:30, which made going to class at 1 pretty painful (and believe me, I know how sad that is). Monday night I didn't manage to sleep until 2 a.m., and woke up on account of a too-early alarm at 4:30 before getting up at 5:30 to start my epic London adventure. It was a really foggy morning. You probably can't tell very well from this photo, but even in the train station there was fog about the rafters. I would have appreciated it a lot more had I not been so exhausted. The train ride to Paris passed in a haze. I arrived at Paris Montparnasse and had to cross the city on the number 4 metro line to change trains (not to mention going through all of the metal detecting...

So about an hour ago I was panicking that I hadn't yet received my tickets to the Monsters of Folk show on Tuesday in London. So I called their office, told someone my problem -- he got a superviser to change my tickets to will call (apparently they don't mail things to France, and didn't bother telling me that when I ordered?), sent me a confirmation email -- and the problem was solved in under five minutes. Why, oh WHY can my washing machine problem not disappear in the same way? Tomorrow I will call them...when I have gathered my willpower...and put more money on my phone. Somehow I doubt my 30 seconds of credit is enough to resolve this problem.

Or, so I infer from the greetings around here. When it starts getting toward that time in the afternoon (which apparently falls anywhere between 3:30 and 8 pm, depending on the various people I've been greeted by), people start saying "bon soir" by way of hello -- for goodbye, on the other hand, they use "bonne soirée". They both mean good evening, but I'm still amused because we also use "soirée" to talk about parties. It's like wherever you are, someone is always hoping you'll have an awesome party. The cashier at the grocery store, the guy that asks you for money on your way home -- everyone! You can tell I didn't have an eventful day, 'cause I don't have much to say. Class as usual, and home now just before the rush exploded on the tram.

Yesterday I went to see The Box with Anthony, which, by the way, was pretty confusing and not at all what I expected. But beforehand, during the inevitable pre-preview commercials, I saw something I've never seen before. A commercial soliciting volunteers for the French Army! And I was struck by all the differences in the advertising campaigns. Lately, the US Army ads I've seen have been all electric guitars and montages of guys doing things like scaling cliffs alone, or drilling with rifles in the rain. The French ad, on the other hand, was all about interspersing images of soldier life and personal life -- I guess kind of like the ads for the Reserves at home. The guy would be on a motorcycle with his girlfriend, and then he'd be leading a troop of uniformed soldiers out of a helicopter, and making hand signs. There was always lots of technology in the picture, and no silly feats of strength. The shots never focused on the guns. There were no swords, and there were no...

"Erasmus" is the magic word that makes professors give you alternate assignments or cut you slack when you had NO IDEA what was going on in class. It also, I have come to realize, is a much larger community of displaced students I ever imagined. When we met that group of Erasmus kids on Halloween by coincidence, it seems we wandered into a new group of people. Some of them are hosting a party just down the street from us tonight, for just a bunch of foreign kids. I'm excited, but I'm not sure how many of them we'll know from other places. It's kind of interesting how, if the only thing you have in common is that you don't belong someplace, that becomes a way to belong in itself. It makes me want to get involved with the exchange programs at OU when I get back to Norman.

The last few years I've watched V for Vendetta on the 5th of November. I think the first time I saw it, we were in Providence, RI on our great northeastern college tour. Strange to think about. Things are really picking up in Bordeaux. Last night there was a sort of welcome party hosted at Place de la Victoire for the Letters/Linguistics department, and Maria and I went. I met several kids I recognized from my linguistics classes, and one kid I met on the tram a few weeks back whose name turned out to be Vianney. He turned out to know Alan, which I found to be sort of crazy -- I mean, if you only know five people in a city, what's the likelihood that they know each other? Tonight, we went with some of the people we met last night to yet another almost-university-sponsored party at a club, this time for the Applied Foreign Languages department (LEA) -- they were all Chinese-English majors. In France, when you major in a foreign language, you major in English AND some other l...

A few weeks ago I was talking to a guy at the pub downstairs about the (non-)tradition of Halloween in France, and he told me basically it was an excuse for young people to throw parties. He told me there was a band called Water's Edge who would be playing at a bar by the river. I told him I'd consider it. Fast forward to last night. Alex and I went out for some late-ish Thai food at a nice restaurant and, afterward, found ourselves at 11 p.m. on Halloween and still no plans. We headed over to the show and saw most of Water's Edge's set. The music was really enjoyable. I saw a girl from my Italian class there, and the original guy who'd told me about the show. We were on the point of leaving when we saw a sign posted outside advertising a midnight showing of Rocky Horror. We were a little confused, since it was 12:15, but the bartender told us it was just because the band had played late. Elated, we stayed to watch. The movie was barely loud enough to hear, an...